


The Great Subduction

by seekingferret



Category: Danger 5, Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Genre: Bar Room Brawl, Gen, Hitler, Post-War, Post-World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-05
Updated: 2012-02-05
Packaged: 2017-10-30 15:20:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/333161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingferret/pseuds/seekingferret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two Hitler-killers meet in a bar. Ouch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Great Subduction

I was there for it, you know. They meet in a bar a couple years after the Long War ends, when they've both been put out to pasture by the kind of political maniacs we put in charge in those confused days, and it's the sort of seismic event people talk about for years after. One of the yahoos at Old Vic's Place used that very word, 'seismic', and Dead Jimmy said they ought to call it the Great Subduction. The two great Hitler-killers pushing up against each other. It was inevitable that one would have to come out on top of the other. 

Dead Jimmy used to be a geology student at the University of Chicago, back before he got his draft card. He was a veteran of the Short War, the one where the Nazis got what was coming to them and sent packing for South America. He came back without his left eye and his right arm and his libido, but he came back somehow anyway. He told me that he had to come back, to prove to his parents what liars the Army were. They sent three notification letters to his parents during the War, each managing to be more gruesome and inaccurate than the last one. At Jimmy's request those letters hung on the wall behind the bar at Old Vic's, eerie reminders of the days when Panzers rolled and being stuck behind enemy lines was almost as good as being dead. Unless you were one of the Basterds, of course.

Dead Jimmy had known Aldo during the War, somehow. The stories he told about the Basterds were obviously exaggerated- they had to be. They couldn't possibly be the truth. But whenever Aldo stopped by Old Vic's he humored the poor cripple and even one-upped him a time or two. No, he'd say, it wasn't seven Nazis that Donowitz took on with a baseball bat. It was nine. One for each inning. Always a wry smile on his face, like the man who knew too much. We played along. He was a hero, Aldo was, and for his troubles they had shoved him out the door as soon as a new Nazi killer rose up, one who wasn't so close with those damned filthy kikes. It wasn't the Short War, anymore. That had ended in a theater in Paris with the fall of the Reich. It was the Long War, dashing from Buenos Aires to Nassau to knock down Nazi outposts like moles in a dingy arcade game. Aldo and his Basterds had taken down a system and an ideology, but that wasn't what this fight required. This required more finesse than someone like Aldo could manage. The World Government didn't want another Tripoli incident. 

So Colonel Aldo Raine wasn't quite a regular, but we knew him down at Old Vic's and he knew us. We were his people. Agent Jackson, late of Danger 5, was a different quantity. The sot staggered into Old Vic's for the first time on a January night, when Aldo and Dead Jimmy were telling Mickey the story of Battle of the Bulge again. Mickey already knew the story, but it was one of his favorites. The image of Stiglitz punching a Nazi so hard his eyes bulged clear out of his head sticks with you. It keeps a man warm on a cold winter evening. Jackson was wearing a green sportscoat on top of some manner of multicolored shirt and he could barely balance himself on the wooden barstool and as he started to listen to Aldo's tale he got a look in his eye that I've seen plenty of times in my life behind the bar, but never quite so sharply. I watched him carefully as he shoved the look back in his drawer and turned to face me.

"I'll have a Manhattan, dear chap," he said to me.

"Don't know what that is, sir," I said back at him. Tried to give him the stinkeye, too, but I'm too nice a guy.

"It's easy, darling. Just whiskey, vermouth, and bitters. In a cocktail glass. With a maraschino cherry sticking out."

"This ain't that sort of place, sir. You can have beer or you can have beer. If your wife just dumped you, I've got some grain liquor that'll blind you. So which'll it be?"

He slumped over, which oddly had the effect of making him seem more stable on the stool. He made a subtle gesture with his left hand which I took as surrender, and when I poured him a pint he didn't push it away. But I didn't stop keeping tabs on him at all times. It was a quiet Tuesday night and I didn't have much else to do. Sometimes that's the most dangerous time. When there's a crowd, everyone knows to be on their toes. People pushing up against people in tight quarters leads to tension. You take that into account and give the people around you a little leeway, least if you want to survive in a place like this. But when you have plenty of personal space you can let your guard down. Hardened killers forget that they're hardened killers with reflexes outside their control. That's probably what happened that night.

Aldo was up to the part where he pretends to be a medical expert. He throws in a few impressive sounded biological terms and makes it sound like it actually explains why a punch in the gut would have that effect on the ocular nerve, but it's all bullshit, and Mickey knew that just as well as Aldo did. It's part of the game. Just a way to kill time and make the winter pass faster. Just a way to make the past sound better than it really was, because as bad as it was back then, it was better than it is today. I know that sounds hokey, like the dumb bartender really believes he's a psychoanalyst, but I'll tell you, we've had psychoanalysts in here and they're just as depressing drunks as anyone else. And as Aldo started talking about the medulla oblongata, the look in Jackson's eye came back, the one that I imagine he saw plenty of times from Nazi deathbots back when he was on active duty.

He felt honor-bound to interrupt. He didn't mean any offense, but he knew his way around a corpse, did this strange intruder, and there was no way the neural pathways worked that way. He'd consulted personally with Dr. Henrik Johanssen, the defected German scientist and had been assured that there was no way this story could actually be true. He said all of this with the self-assurance and arrogance of a drunk, or a top-flight OSS operative. Being both, it was probably unavoidable. Problem being, Aldo was a drunk and a Southerner, and that was nearly as bad. 

"Son, "Aldo slurred, "I've been killing Nazis since before you were in diapers. I'm the man who killed Hitler. The first time, back when killing Hitler meant something. Nowadays sending boys out to kill Hitler is a routine training mission. Nothin' to it. So how's about when I tell you what Senator Stiglitz did back when he was a Sergeant under my personal command, you take it as the gospel truth, son."

That was when a gun popped into Jackson's hand. I was looking at him and his hands were at his side, then I looked down for a second at a stain in the barroom floor and there was an auto pistol in his hand, safety off. I followed the gun's line of sight straight to Aldo's chest and saw that an old Colt pistol was now in Aldo's hand, too. I sigh. But what else can I do. I pull my surplussed M1 out from behind the bar and point it first at Aldo, then at Jackson, and then at the sign behind the bar. NO FIREARMS ALLOWED. KNIVES AND CLUBS WE DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT. The guns pop back out of their hands, replaced with knives and clubs, and I can see that Mickey and Blind Bill and the Red Retriever have knives out too.

"Sorry, Joe," Aldo said cheerfully, and Jackson mumbled a similar apology. Then they closed in on each other, so fast I couldn't follow it. The rest of the fight was the same way. All I can remember is a series of tableaux, a sort of rake's progress of past their prime Nazi hunters. Aldo on one knee before a supine Jackson, trying to shove his other foot down Jackson's throat. Jackson frozen mid-backflip, his knife darting out toward Aldo's exposed left arm. A bloody, bruised Aldo on hands and knees reaching out for his knife as Jackson prepares a ruthless kick. The two men wrapped in a wrestling hold, so tight together that it's impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. And then, it couldn't have been more than twenty seconds after the fight started, an unconscious Jackson lying on the barroom floor next to that stain I still can't eradicate, bleeding a torrent from his newly broken nose. Aldo Raine, eternal leader of the Basterds, finishing off his beer and tossing me a generous tip. The Great Subduction. They don't make 'em like Aldo anymore.


End file.
